Introduction: what
is an ushnu?

The Inca capital Cusco
and principal outlying towns of the Inca Empire were
organised around a public plaza with a specially-constructed
platform placed facing a designated sacred central space called the
ushnu. This sacred space was marked by a vertical opening
into the body of the earth into which liquid and other offerings
were made.

The ushnu platform was therefore a kind of stage from which
the Inca king and his lords could observe and
rule over an annual round of seasonal festivals and
ceremonial events.

In the late 1990s archaeologists in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia,
Chile and Argentina began mapping the full system of Inca roads,
including many of the less accessible, secondary trails at high
altitude. In Peru this survey soon revealed a previously
unrecognised category of stone platform with typically distinctive
Inca stonework. These structures are carefully positioned on
isolated mountain-tops 4000–4800 metres above sea
level and represent some of the highest dressed-stone
architecture found anywhere in the Americas, and possibly in the
world. These structures were clearly important in Inca
political and sacred geography and had profound symbolic
significance.

The sites were selected to command unsurpassed views of the
snow-capped mountain peaks, worshipped as wamanis, or
mountain deities, by the local communities. In this way local
deities were incorporated into the overarching Inca state religion.
The Incas used the platforms as potent symbols of religious and
political authority. They served as an innovative and powerful new
instrument of statecraft in order both to defne and proclaim their
growing imperial hegemony.